As the indoor unit of the air conditioner, there is an indoor unit which is embedded in a ceiling (ceiling-embedded type). The indoor unit of the ceiling-embedded type air conditioner sucks indoor air by rotating a centrifugal fan, cools the sucked air by a heat exchanger during cooling, and blows out the air from an outlet thereof to cool a room.
Although the centrifugal fan discharges the air toward the heat exchanger, since height of a discharge port of the centrifugal fan is about half height of the heat exchanger, the air does not uniformly hit an entire region in a height direction of the heat exchanger. As a result, since heat transfer performance of the heat exchanger is degraded, cooling capacity is reduced. On the other hand, an increase of a volume of the air to compensate for the reduction in the cooling capacity leads to an increase in noise and an increase in fan power.
In contrast, there has been proposed an indoor unit including a flow path expansion member which gently spreads a flow of the air blown out from the fan toward the heat exchanger (see Patent Document 1).